Dreaming digital landscapes

Abstract

The metaphor of digital landscapes captures a dream for spatial digital tools and analysis that are distinct from the characteristic and theoretical structures that inform tools developed with metaphors like artificial intelligence. Where artificial intelligence suggests automation, rapacious surveillance, and increasing commodification of data, digital landscapes open opportunities for collaborative production that makes representation apparent, attends to the material aspects of the digital, and engenders digital agency guided and bound by clear principles and values. Digital landscapes are an intentionally spatial metaphor that also encourage geographers to return to a leadership role in making tools, rather than primarily using or critiquing them. This making can be guided and bound through a confluence of the varied questions, skills, and theoretical structures that the field contains, and that the communities we work with need.